US giants buy Indian start-ups for talent

Acquisitions not necessarily giving them access to new technology

US technology giants such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple are looking at acquiring Indian start-ups to cream off the highquality talent available in the country in order to create new-age products or services.

The acquisition of these companies will not necessarily give these large firms access to any new technology or markets. Since 2014, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple have made their first acquisitions in India.

The trend was started by Facebook, which acquired Bengaluru-based Little Eye Labs in January 2014, which built software tools for analysing the performance of Android apps, in what could be called in start-up parlance acqui-hire or buying companies for their talent.

The five-member team, including cofounders Giridhar Murthy, Lakshman Kakkirala, and Aditya Kulkarni of Little Eye Labs, moved to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, where they continue to work as engineers, working on products for the social network.

Twitter made the next move, acquiring Pune-based Zipdial in January 2015. While founder Valerie Wagoner moved to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, the rest of the team, including co-founder Amiya Pathak, took up roles at Twitter’s India unit.

Both Wagoner and Pathak have moved on from Twitter into other roles, but several ex-Zipdial employees continue to work in the social network’s India office.

“This is more of team and talent acquisition, it happens globally and isn’t unique to India. The reason we haven’t seen too many acquisitions for technology in India is because no one is doing any significant R&D or new product and technology development here,” said Harish H V, Partner at Grant Thornton.

Similarly, the world’s most valuable company, Apple, acquired a Hyderabadbased start-up called Tuplejump in April 2013. At least seven employees, including founders Rohit Rai and Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu, are now in the US, working at various offices of Apple.

Tuplejump was a building a data-mining and analysis platform, but its employees have been absorbed into Apple’s own teams. The LinkedIn profile of Helena Edelson, the vice-president of engineering at Tuplejump, reads: “Designing,

building and running fault tolerant distributed systems at massive scale, massive data. In Scala.”

Earlier this week, a four-month-old Bengaluru-based start-up Halli Labs announced that it had been acquired by Google. It isn’t clear what the startup was building, except for the fact that it was in the AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) domain. According to a LinkedIn search, the company has four employees including founder and Chief Executive Officer Pankaj Gupta.

Gupta, who moved to India last year, worked for Stayzilla before the company shut shop earlier this year. The computer science PhD holder from Stanford University then started out on his own, only to be acquired by Google four months later. He’d also been one of the core engineers at Twitter when the company was starting operations in Silicon Valley.

“I think India has a good amount of talent, but one of the challenges is that our society prides itself more on management than technology. Every guy who starts as a programmer within two-three years wants to become a manager. Hopefully with so many accelerators here now, people will build good products here and we’ll see more global acquisitions for technology,” Harish said.